Cock
Boy’s School, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
“You take it out first,” someone says at the beginning of Cock, a play that, like its title, is as mischievous as it is creatively ambiguous.
The instruction comes from a man seen bossing his boyfriend around their kitchen, but, in a story full of double meanings, it also sounds like potential relationship advice: is sex a good reason to stay with someone?
A critical hit on its premiere, in 2009, that set the English playwright Mike Bartlett on a path towards deification – he recently had three plays running at once in London – Cock notably reverses an idea we’ve seen since the steamy, agonised lovers of James Baldwin’s fiction.
Instead of a closeted husband leaving his wife to find himself, here a man identifying as gay surprises himself by sleeping with a woman.
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When John, a self-doubting twentysomething played by a fresh-faced Seán Mc Manus, discovers that his boyfriend has been hit by a car and walked away unscathed, he’s astonished that anybody could be so self-composed: “You’d have to put me back together piece by piece!”
By contrast, his partner is extremely self-confident: an older stockbroker – hand permanently on hip and chin raised in Joseph Ryan Warner’s performance – who nags John and tells him he’s useless before insisting on his affection. (“I’m like a puppy,” he says, all cutesy.)
Staged by Katie O’Halloran (the director behind charming works like The Perfect Immigrant and Eleanora Salter and the Monster from the Sea) and coproduced by Sarah Wiley (who oversaw the comedy – and fringe-theatre treatise – Dog Shit) with the newcomer Muirenn Lyons, Bartlett’s play moves with the diagrammatic sophistication of a bedroom farce.
In the messy, reluctant separation of a break-up, John is seen going back and forth, jumping in and out of bed with a divorced woman he meets during his daily commute (played by Claire Gleeson) and then heading back to his boyfriend for forgiveness.
Both Mc Manus and Gleeson nicely depict twentysomethings at unexpected crossroads, but their performances feel unfreighted by greater anxieties of potentially taking the wrong step to transform their lives, in level-headed portrayals of characters who are unravelling (“I’m talking a lot!” “Sorry, I got a little distracted!”).
As the play moves from the squirm of new uncertain pleasures towards a calamitous group dinner, Bartlett seems most interested in ice-cold prejudice. “I want to meet the woman who turned your head,” Warner’s stockbroker sneers, in a role bitter enough to be near unpalatable.
As others try to pressure John to make a decision on his sexual orientation, the play resists any labels, although, tellingly, someone says at one point, “You’re being selfish” – a low blow often aimed at bisexual people.
As a mainstream narrative of gay acceptance seems to ossify into yet another conservatism, excluding certain members of the queer community, John finds the eloquence to highlight the way a society sooner demands to know what somebody wants rather than being interested in who they are.
In a grim denouement, Bartlett is finally candid in an ambiguous drama: some people are cocks.
Cock is at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 8
